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New Orleans and the Spanish World New Orleans and the Spanish World A concert presented by The Historic New Orleans Collection & the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra “New Orleans and the Spanish World” is the ninth installment of Musical Louisiana: America’s Cultural Heritage, an annual series presented by The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra. Dedicated to the study of Louisiana’s contributions to the world of classical music, the award-winning program also provides online educational materials to fourth- and eighth-grade public and private school teachers throughout Louisiana. Copies of the program and the accompanying CD are sent to university music libraries across the state, as well as professors and music programs nationwide. Since the program’s inception, Musical Louisiana has garnered both local and national recognition. The 2008 presentation, “Music of the Mississippi,” won the Big Easy Award for Arts Education; “Made in Louisiana” (2009) received an Access to Artistic Excellence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; “Identity, History, Legacy: La Société Philharmonique” (2011) received an American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius grant from the National Endowment for the Arts; and “Envisioning Louisiana” (2013) won a $20,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support its educational component. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation made possible the streaming of the 2012, 2013, and 2014 concerts. The 2014 program, “Postcards from Paris,” attracted viewers in ten countries and reached 26,000 listeners through the radio broadcasts on WWNO and KTLN. “New Orleans and the Spanish World” celebrates the rich cultural and musical relations between Spain and Louisiana. To help us celebrate this tradition of musical exchange, Damián del Castillo from Spain and Abdiel Vázquez from Mexico have traveled to New Orleans to serve as soloists. This year’s concert is once again streaming live on LPOmusic.com, supported by the Pan- American Life Insurance Group, and WWNO will broadcast the program live on 89.9 FM, KTLN 90.5 FM, and wwno.org. Sponsored by Live internet streaming of this concert on LPOmusic.com is supported by Pan-American Life Insurance Group. \ Please silence your cell phones during the performance. The use of recording devices and flash photography is strictly prohibited. COVER IMAGE: Detail from The Tango: see page 10 The Historic New Orleans Collection and The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra Carlos Miguel Prieto Adelaide Wisdom Benjamin Music Director and Principal Conductor PRESENT New Orleans and the Spanish World Carlos Miguel Prieto, conductor Damián del Castillo, baritone Karol Mossakowski, organ Rafael R. Shabetai, narrator Abdiel Vázquez, piano Wednesday, February 4, 2015 Cathedral-Basilica of St. Louis, King of France New Orleans, Louisiana The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra gratefully acknowledge the Very Rev. Gregory M. Aymond, archbishop of New Orleans; Very Rev. Philip G. Landry, rector of the St. Louis Cathedral; and the staff of the St. Louis Cathedral for their generous support and assistance with this evening’s performance. NEW ORLEANS AND THE SPANISH WORLD “You can listen in New Orleans to the music of the Spanish nations, which in many cases is inexpressibly beautiful. In Mexico, for example, there has been developed a school which combines, so far as I can see, the tendencies of the Spanish race on the one hand and of the Aztec and Tolteca on the other. This school has expressed itself in hundreds of songs, zarzuelas, danzas, masses, sonatas, and operettas. Not more than a score of these have been heard in New York, but hundreds of them are household words in New Orleans. It would seem as if the love of melody decreases as you come north from the Gulf of Mexico, and reaches its smallest development when it encounters the northern tier of the states of the union.” —William T. Francis in the Daily Picayune, January 2, 1890 In the wake of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World, the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the non- European world between the two Iberian naval superpowers—Spain and Portugal. With a stroke of a pen on June 7, 1494, what would eventually become Louisiana was declared Spanish. The first Europeans known to visit Louisiana were Alonso Álvarez de Pineda, who traversed the Gulf Coast in 1519, and Hernando de Soto, whose party explored the lower Mississippi River valley from 1539 to 1543. The land was largely ignored by Spain for 140 years, and as a result, in 1682 René-Robert Cavelier, sieur de La Salle, claimed the territory for France. Louisiana’s distance from France and its other New World claims made trade and travel difficult. In contrast, the proximity and the extent of Spanish provinces in the Western hemisphere—including Havana, Merida, Veracruz, and Spain’s holdings in Florida—meant that the young French colony was surrounded by Spanish influence, resulting in close ties between Louisiana and the Spanish New World. Once the colony was transferred from France to Spain, in 1762, authorities in Havana and Mexico City oversaw the colony’s operations, further cementing Louisiana’s connections to the wider Spanish New World. This period proved to be formative in the development of the Louisiana settlement. Recognizing the need to ABOVE: Nouvelle Orléans; ca. 1834; print by Ambroise Louis Garneray, painter; Sigismond Himely, engraver; Edouard Hocquart, printer; THNOC, 1974.25.8.248 2 populate the colony in order to protect it against French and British interests, Spain encouraged the immigration of Canary Islanders, Malagueños—natives of Málaga, Spain—and displaced Acadians. Arts and culture also saw a boom during the decades of Spanish rule. Louisiana’s first newspaper appeared in 1794, and its first opera was performed two years later. (The fact that both the newspaper, Le Moniteur de la Louisiane, and the opera, Sylvain, were French testifies to the colony’s linguistic multivalence.) Individual Spanish artists had long been entwined with European colonization efforts— the Spanish painter Miguel García, for instance, was a member of Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, sieur de Bienville’s 1699 party—but by the late eighteenth century, New Orleans was large enough to support a small community of artists, including Joseph Furcoty, Joseph Herrera, and José de Salazar. Indeed, the city’s growth may be credited in large part to the Spanish philanthropist Andrés Almonester y Roxas. The construction of the Royal Hospital (1783), the Leper’s Hospital (1785), and the church of the Ursuline nuns (1787) was mere prelude to his buildings that have come to define New Orleans: the Presbytère, the parish church of St. Louis, and the Cabildo. Together with the apartment complex of his daughter, the Baroness Pontalba, these buildings form one of the most well- known civic centers in the United States. New Orleans’s relationship to the Spanish world did not end with the Louisiana Purchase. The Spanish press in particular continued to grow in importance. No fewer than thirty-seven Spanish newspapers were published in New Orleans during the nineteenth century. Both the French L’Abeille de la Nouvelle-Orléans and the English Times-Democrat had Spanish sections. New Orleans also became important politically as a home for Spanish American political exiles such as Benito Juárez of Mexico, and Venezuelan buccaneer Narciso López used New Orleans as a base of operations for his efforts to free Cuba from Spain. President Porfirio Díaz of Mexico showcased the richness of Mexico at the 1884 World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans. In the twentieth century, educational and economic initiatives enhanced the relationship between Louisiana and the Spanish world. As the Panama Canal neared completion, New Orleanians envisioned their city ABOVE LEFT: Header from La Patria; January 1849; newspaper; THNOC. 59-222-L ABOVE RIGHT: Mexican section, main building, at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition at New Orleans; between 1884 and 1885; photograph by Edward L. Wilson; THNOC, 1982.127.53 3 as a link between the Americas and European markets. The monthly El Mercurio, published in New Orleans from 1911 to 1927, was a richly illustrated journal promoting that vision. The New Orleans Board of Trade encouraged the city’s school board to offer classes in Spanish. In 1914, Tulane University opened the College of Commerce and Business Administration with courses focused on Spanish and Latin American markets; in 1924 Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute sponsored major archaeological excavations in the Yucatán. Continuing a tradition that dated to the eighteenth century, Spanish students continued to travel to New Orleans for grammar, high school, and college education. In the mid-1960s, Loyola University’s Human Relations Institute established the Inter- American Center to train leaders from Latin America in social reform. Later in the twentieth century, New Orleans became a medical center for Latin American patients and for the training of Latin American physicians, through the efforts of Dr. Alton Ochsner. Such activity continued to strengthen New Orleans’s strong socioeconomic and political ties to the Spanish-speaking world. Throughout the twentieth century, the arts continued to imbue the region with a Spanish flavor. A handful of examples give a sense of the richness of the relationship: in 1927, local audiences had the opportunity to witness performances by the great Guerrero-Mendoza theatrical
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